I just got a new tape recorder, a fact which I forgot to mention to Jeffrey Lewis (who is playing The Cat Tonight with the Rosebuds and British Sea Power) during our long phone conversation on a bright spring afternoon. I walked around with my phone on speaker and the new mini-recorder in my left hand, as Capital Hill’s rotting blossoms blew into the gutters and we talked about integrity, fascism, sincerity, and the inscrutably fearsome visage of Will Oldham, but I bet I should have told him about it, he probably would have liked to talk about Dictaphones. His first recordings were done in his house and handed by members of the Moldy Peaches to a guy from Rough Trade Records, a company at the time dead-set on scooping the best players from the New York anti-folk scene and giving them record deals and sticking them in NME. That was at the turn of the century, before the spread of pro-tools and indie-house and Juno and i-pods and myspace-signings, and in some ways even Lewis’s newest music, recorded in a studio with a band rather than on a fuzzy deck by himself or with his brother, has the intimacy and charming flaws of an old piece of tape.

It’s probably his voice, which stumbles, rushes through lines and cracks with emotion often, but not in the way that say, Conor Oberst or even our old buddy Kimya Dawson’s does. His voice cracks like a laugh in a punchline, like a yodel in an aria—the emotions that overcome him aren’t anything as facile as ennui or outrage. He’s joking with his songs rather than against them, like all the best folk singers he’s undermining his own authority, subverting the Authenticity mantle deliberately, akin to Leadbelly’s muttering, Billy Bragg’s honk or Dylan and his funky monkey chuckle. His 2007 critically trumpeted record 12 Crass Songs reworks the “hits” of the seminal leftie British hardcore band into wry and melodic personal statements, and is both utterly earnest even as it upends the political messages of every lyric by making them about Jeffrey rather than society at large. When he sings, “I am a product. I am a symbol of endless, hopeless, fruitless, aimless games,” it is touching in a way that the shrieks and grinds of the original can never be, at once elevating the words to the level of poetry even as it permanently trades the confrontational sneer for a welcoming smile. It’s a neat trick which works on a lot of levels, not the least being that it shocks the listener simply by being beautiful.

I wandered past a school just letting out, kids in white shirts fighting and joking, and I lost his voice for a second just as he was telling me how anyone can play music, make art, and everyone should. It’s an honorable sentiment, but ironically this self-effacing and innate spirit of democracy is what makes him better than most of his peers at creating art unadorned with fancy production values or professionalism. Anyone could ramble onto a tape like Jeffrey Lewis, but the result would indubitably not be as honest, or as riveting.

BYT: Who are the Jitters? Is that the usual bunch of peeps you play with?
Jeffrey Lewis: It’s my brother Jack on bass who I’ve been playing with since I started making music; he’s always been a musical collaborator of mine. My old friend Dave on drums, and lately my girlfriend Helen has been touring with us as well. But the Jitters is not a stable name. For every tour we pick a different band name. It’s always been the case, since I originally started out without a band, and the stuff has always had my own name on it, we’ve always had an issue of trying to decide on a band name since it’s not just me as a solo performer as the name Jeffrey Lewis would seem to indicate. Of course, since we’re brothers we could never really agree on anything, so the compromise solution is that we come up with a new band name every few months. Jeffrey Lewis and the This. Jeffrey Lewis and the That. We just have fun with it and switch it up every time. But this tour is solo acoustic actually.

BYT: Oh, so are you going to be playing stuff off of 12 Crass Songs by yourself?

JL: Not so much. Even with the band we never like to be locked into a particular script. I don’t want to go out as a cover artist, though I love doing the Crass material. Since putting that album out we have had some Crass songs in the live set on any given night, and as a solo performer I mix in one or two Crass songs every time I play. But it certainly was never my intention to be a tribute band of any kind. Actually I’ve always enjoyed throwing in unexpected covers into my live set for years and the fact that I’ve done a whole album of covers doesn’t really affect the show that much. I’ve got plenty of my own songs and my own comic books and stuff I do.

BYT: So was it that you love Crass and wanted to cover a bunch of their songs, or was it, “Wouldn’t it be sick if we made a record of just acoustic covers of hardcore songs?” and Crass made the most sense, or…

JL: A combination of those things, and also, I just love the idea of doing interesting cover songs. I love music, I love discovering new bands. Part of being a music lover is that when you get really into a band that none of your friends have heard of you can be like, “Check out this thing that I found back from ‘66!” or “Here’s this amazing folk guy from 1982 that I’ve never heard of…” And part of that is doing cover songs, seeing a band and going Wow I can’t believe they’re playing that song! So we always try to pick interesting covers. We did Murder Mystery by the Velvet Underground for a while, stuff by the Last Poets or the Monks or the Fall. And Crass songs started creeping into the set a couple of years ago. The songwriting is just so incedible, the thought just struck me that there’s a whole body of work that is absolutely mind-blowing that a lot of people haven’t been exposed to and it’d be fantastic to bring these songs to a whole new bunch of ears that could be amazed at how good they are. Then there’s the fact that as a folk singer not a punk band, doing these songs is going to get them a lot more attention.

BYT: You like to use your status in one scene to sort of spoon feed your audience this musical history. That song The History of Punk on the Lower East Side 1950-1975 reminds me of the 60s folk songs about mine strikes and union heroes…is it a deliberate tribute to that kind of thing, or just something you want people to care about?

JL: Well music is definitely a great vehicle for spreading information and education. That’s something that a lot of bands don’t do. And it’s kind of a shame. It is more of a part of the folk tradition than the rock tradition. I’ve worked in a lot of stuff like that. I’ve got this whole illustrated history of communism thing, showing illustrations while singing [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ryogcssMvg] the whole history of events in the Soviet Union and China, and the history of Rough Trade Records…once I realized that I could do that in song form it almost became too easy to find great material, since I don’t have to write things from scratch. History and Politics and Humanity or even the music industry itself, are all so full of amazing stories and situations and characters that it takes a lot of heat off me as a songwriter. Truth is stranger than fiction in so many cases.

BYT: Well, I’m assuming the events of some songs aren’t literal…like that Will Oldham song?

JL: Yeah a lot of stuff has no connection to reality but those are just tools I have to work with when I’m making comic books or songs. There’s such a huge world both inside your head and outside in the real world that to limit yourself to one or the other would cut off too much. Anyone trying to be creative should be open to the possibility of making stuff up or documenting actual events.

BYT: About that song, have you every gotten any flack from him or his fans for depicting him, even though it’s obviously fictional, as a sphinx-like pervert?

JL: I haven’t had any personally feedback from him about it…I do seem to have become his stand-in in New York though. He apparently doesn’t like playing in New York anymore and they have been a couple situations where people contacted him about events in New York and he told them that he doesn’t want to play here they should just contact Jeff Lewis…which, having never really hung out with the guy…I mean, I only know about it because people have contacted me and been like, “We were hoping to get Will Oldham play this event but he suggested that you should play it.” I have no idea what that means, whether it’s like “Man that sucks, but I’ll stick this guy with it because I want to get him back,” or whether he’s doing it out of kindness…I really don’t know.

BYT: He’s such a weird dude, it’s a great choice for that song.

JL: He’s definitely a genius of some kind. He’s a great songwriter and performer…but just for cultivating that kind of mystique; it’s not something most people can do.

BYT: Going back to history lessons for a second, I love the fact that you start talking about punk rock in the context of the weirdo folk scene in New York that Dylan came from, along with the Fugs and the Velvets and such…is that a connection that has been permanently lost between folk and punk?

JL: A lot of it has been deliberately crossed out of music history. When British punk exploded they were really trying to sever their connections to the New York scene and create something of their own, which they did do. But in the heyday of 70s British punk they were all about a total Fuck You to the past you know? “Fuck all these hippies, fuck everything that came before.” There are lots of examples: in the Fall’s first single he starts insulting the Blank Generation which must be attacking Richard Hell, or the Sex Pistols song New York, a put down of the New York Dolls. Which is weird because clearly these bands wouldn’t exist without Patti Smith and all of the New York stuff, but it’s just part of their aesthetic to have this massive Fuck You, it’s what’s so thrilling about that music. So I saw a thread in New York that most people didn’t know about. I just love all those [folk-punk] albums and I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t considered a genre or a timeline of connected recordings. They all seemed like isolated freak bands—like Silver Apples or the Godz or Suicide—but put together they fit into this weird New York continuity.

BYT: And there’s a sideways connection with the scattered weirdos around the world at the time in the garage scene, like you mentioned the Monks in Germany…

JL: I just realized that there’s a Shangri Las song that the Monks totally copied that was released like 6 months before their song. The Monks must have just gotten it and said “Wow nobody else in Germany is going to hear this Shangri Las so let’s turn it into our own thing.” That kind of thing used to go on often. Musicians these days are too nervous about copying other people or about developing on other people’s material. That’s one of the great folk music traditions, that you should take other people’s work and embellish on it, to be part of the tradition.

BYT: Is that sharing of idea and songs something that set the anti-folk scene that you came out of apart from more competitive scenes in rock and roll?

JL: That sense of community is something that definitely exists in other place but it was a really cool thing about that scene in New York. Right now I’m visiting an old songwriting companion who lives in North Carolina. It’s been great touring North America because I get to see al these people that I had originally known from hanging out in that little anti-folk scene. Everybody still stays in touch. That’s usually something you find more among jazz musicians who are interchanging in each other’s bands, but it doesn’t seem to happen as much in folk. Maybe it does, but I’ve never really encountered it other than in the anti-folk scene.

BYT: Is the renewed attention that’s being paid to the scene now because of the Juno soundtrack, is that too little too late or is it just good for your friends to be selling records?

JL: I think talent always rises to the surface, whether it takes six months or ten years or whatever it is. Great artists and great recordings, just by word of mouth, will hopefully reach the ears that they want to reach. Of course if something ends up in a soundtrack or a commercial it accelerates that process.

BYT: One thing that sets you apart in my mind from the people from that scene is your ability to avoid either being really smirky and half-assed musically or being cloyingly auto-biographical and bloggy in writing a first person song. Why do you think it’s so difficult to play this music that’s supposed to be just unassuming and off-the-cuff?

JL: I think it’s more of a challenge in modern times with young people not to be ironic, because we’re so oversaturated. Almost every album that’s ever been made is probably in print right now, more than any time before. We just have access now to every creative thing, every movie, for something to be out of print in this day and age it has to be pretty obscure. There are still a lot of things that are that obscure, but we’re just so exposed to everything that people have made that it’s really hard in the fact of that to muster up the sincerity to give it your best shot, when you’ve seen millions and millions of people who have been sincere have ended up as failed obscurities. And to take that shot with your whole heart in the face of knowing how likely it is to fail is really hard. So a lot of people would rather be like well, it’s OK, I’m probably going to fail but I’m not trying that hard. Certainly I fit into that definition because I know I’m never going to make a record that sounds as great as an early Stones record, or even any number of albums that totally failed, but the musicianship and the vocals and the songwriting and production is at a level that I’m aware that I could never achieve. But in that predestined sense of failure, there’s a level of honesty that comes with that. And…schhhhhhhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeekkkkkrrrrrrrreeeech…

Here’s where my tape recorder broke.

No amount of battery switching or rewinding or tape-flipping could redeem the part of the story where he talked about Jonathan Richman and Daniel Johnston, his comic books, and his thoughts about why the Moldy Peaches are so incredible. In this overly documented world of the wide web this bit of conversation will have to remain my secret. Needless to say, it was transcendent and I’m sorry you all missed it. Maybe you can just extrapolate some of the mysteries he revealed from this great song of his:

BYT: So, once you’re done with these eight million summer tours, you’re going to take another stab in the dark making a record right? Is it going to have a unifying concept like the last one?

jL: One complaint that I got about the albums before 12 Crass Songs is that they were all over the place in terms of musical styles, but I don’t think that’s going to change. I like albums where you don’t know what’s going to come next, like Ween or someone. So I guess it will be more of the same.

BYT: Well I’m looking forward to it. Thanks so much for your time!

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